Morris Berman Quotes

An idea is something you have; an ideology is something that has you

[I]nfinity is not part of the real world.

Morris Berman has pointed out that museums characteristically present hard things, such as axes and spears, as evidence of early culture. But culture very likely begins with baskets made of reeds that are “soft” and hold emptiness.

We live in a collective adrenaline rush, a world of endless promotional/commercial bullshit, that masks a deep systemic emptiness, the spiritual equivalent of asthma.

Negative identity is a phenomenon whereby you define yourself by what you are not. This has enormous advantages, especially in terms of the hardening of psychological boundaries and the fortification of the ego: one can mobilize a great deal of energy on this basis and the new nation [the US] certainly did. . . . The downside . . . is that this way of generating an identity for yourself can never tell you who you actually are, in the affirmative sense. It leaves, in short, an emptiness at the center, such that you always have to be in opposition to something, or even at war with someone or something, in order to feel real.

Ottoman Empire. “The West,” writes Huntington, “won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion…but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”29

The result is that children now live in an “ethos of fantasy consumerism.” Modern American childhood, says Cross,

If you doubt for a moment that there is a “vast, right-wing conspiracy” in this country, you must be living on another planet.74

how reality feels. People addicted to busyness, people who don’t just use their cell phones in public but display in every nuance of cell-phone deportment their sense of throbbing connectedness to Something Important—these people would suffocate like fish on a dock if they were cut off from the Flow of Events they have conspired with their fellows to create. To these plugged-in players, the rest of us look like zombies, coasting on fumes. For

In 1997, the government spent $37 billion on military research and development, nearly two-thirds of what the entire world spent on the same. In

Love denied, and the somatic experience of that denial, is─as de Rougemont recognized─the hidden, and gnostic/heretical, thread of Western History.

Department stores, hotels, and amusement parks began to dot the landscape, and by World War I, buying was seen as the road to happiness. Money became the measure of everything, friendship and religion included.

It is also why there is so little tolerance for substantive dis- sent, or fundamental critique, in America. Since our identity is in fact quite brittle, we have to be constantly telling ourselves how fabulous we are.

All-out nuclear war, of course, is just a literary device here; it is not a prerequisite for contemporary cultural disintegration, and indeed, one could argue that corporate consumer culture is tantamount to a kind of nuclear attack on the mind.

The paradox of this arrangement was not lost on Lewis Mumford, who described suburbia as “a collective effort to live a private life.” In many ways, this goes to the heart of the matter, for it is a project based on self-contradiction—the tragedy of American domestic

For millions of Arabs and Muslims, this universe of abstract systems, this world of Western freedom and individualism, constitutes the soullessness of modernity. The attack on the World Trade Center, in this interpretation, was not so much an attack on the United States, but on modernity—secular, non-tribal modernity—itself.

The problem is that this fluidity is not a choice we are free to make. Despite the unifying patriotic rhetoric that permeates the United States, on some level Americans are not really fooled: at bottom, each person knows he or she must continually “reinvent themselves,” which is to say, go it alone. America is the ultimate anticommunity.3

The outlay for defense was 4.6 percent of the GDP in 1950; by 1953 it had risen to 13.8 percent. In 1940 the federal budget devoted 16 percent to defense; in 1959, more than 50 percent. By 1955, the American alliance system circled the globe, and we were pledged to the defense of practically everybody, including a host of despots and autocrats. The

The West developed the notion of the “corporate body,” the senate or representative assembly; Islam did not. The West, in a secularization of the Catholic corpus mysticum, eventually developed the idea of the corporation that lies at the heart of capitalism; Islam did not. Western science has the notions of the fact-value distinction, genuine critical analysis, and provisional truth; Islam keeps reason subordinate to faith.

For a zoned-out, stupefied populace, “democracy” will be nothing more than the right to shop, or to choose between Wendy’s and Burger King, or to stare at CNN and think that this managed infotainment is actually the news. Corporate hegemony, the triumph of global democracy/consumerism based on an American model, is the collapse of American civilization. So a large-scale transformation is indeed going on, but it is one that makes triumph indistinguishable from disintegration.

This is the ultimate heresy, then, and a possible outcome of a history of ascent, of system-breaks and paradigm-shifts that are exciting on one level, tedious on another: life characterized by so much somatic security, so much incarnation, that the need for “truth” is far less important than the need for love; and finally, not really in conflict with it. Incarnation means living in life, not transcending it. The last paradigm-shift has to be a shift to a world in which paradigm-shifts become unnecessary, if not actually banal.

On 1 November 1983 Secretary of State George Shultz received intelligence reports showing that Iraq was using chemical weapons almost daily. The following February, Iraq used large amounts of mustard gas and also the lethal nerve agent tabun (this was later documented by the United Nations); Reagan responded (in November) by restoring diplomatic relations with Iraq. He and Bush Sr. also authorized the sale of poisonous chemicals, anthrax, and bubonic plague. Along with French supply houses, American Type Culture Collection of Manassas, Virginia, shipped seventeen types of biological agents to Iraq that were then used in weapons programs. In 1989, ABC-TV news correspondent Charles Glass discovered what the U.S. government had been denying, that Iraq had biological warfare facilities. This was corroborated by evidence from a defecting Iraqi general. The Pentagon immediately denied the facts.

Literacy, the most empowering achievement of our civili- zation, is to be replaced by a vague and ill-defined screen savvy. The paper book, the tool that built modernity, is to be phased out in favor of fractured, unfixed information. All in the name of progress.

a “brave new world of affluent depravity.”44 Genovese sees it as ironic that the defeat of the South, of slav- ery, opened the doors to an imperialism that imposed “unprec- edented misery and mass slaughter on the world.

populist fantasies. And the truth is that real change is historical, and if one is going to point to, say,

As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much mon- ey will it bring in?     —Alexis de Tocqueville, letter to Ernest de Chabrol, June 9, 1831                                         1

The unpleasant truth of middle-class American life, he concludes, is that “most of us don’t talk to our neighbors about anything except the weather.

a world remade in the image of Walt Disney, and driven by an increasingly sophisticated communications technology, is the total breakdown of civilization.20

The less affluent must be able, at least in theory, to catch up with the more affluent. Hence politics remains without substance, a realm from which the crucial dimensions of life, the core values, are excluded.42 Who, then, can criticize this situation?

Who can doubt that there is an American empire?—an “informal” empire, not colonial in polity, but still richly equipped with imperial paraphernalia: troops, ships, planes, bases, proconsuls, local collaborators, all spread around the luckless planet. —Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Cycles of American History (1984)

There is one problem, however, at least for alternative experiments of the American variety (and possibly some European as well), namely that we have no clear litmus test to determine which models are truly steady-state (non-expansionist) and which are business as usual hiding under “green wigs.” This latter trend is known as “greenwashing,” in which the language is hip and the bottom line remains profit. Thomas Friedman and Al Gore are major (and wealthy) players in this category, perpetuating the notion of “green corporations.” Other examples include a 2012 conference on “Sustainable Investing,” sponsored by Deepak Chopra, among others, which had as its slogans “Make Money and Make a Difference” and “Capitalism for a Democratic Society.” All of this is the attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too (or simply eat someone else’s cake); there is no real interest in disconnecting from growth, and it is growth that is the core of the problem. As Professor Magnuson tells us, while traveling around the U.S. to interview varous alternative businesses and experiments, he discovered that many of them were shams—capitalist wolves in green clothing.

The seduction of shopping is not about buying goods. It’s about dreaming of a perfect society and a perfect self.” We are looking, she says, “for truth with a capital T…. In a society where we no longer have contact with nature or beauty in our daily lives, shopping is one of the few ways we have left to create a sense of ultimate value.” We are, she concludes, “searching for our dreams,” and seek to fulfill them in stores.5

There is an old joke that asks, “What do you get when you cross a deconstructionist with a mafioso? Answer: someone who makes you an offer you cannot understand.

Nunca he oído conversar a ningún americano sin que pronunciara la palabra "dólar".